1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to semiconductor devices, and more particularly, to a memory device having minimized power consumption upon reading or writing, and a data reading, and writing method for accomplishing reduced power reading and writing of data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Semiconductor devices such as a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) generally repeat reading and writing of data. However, reading and writing of data consumes a considerable amount of power.
For example, upon reading of data, a bit line sense amplifier senses and amplifies data transferred to a pair of bit lines and transmits the resultant data to a pair of input and output lines. An input and output sense amplifier senses and amplifies data transferred to the pair of input and output lines. The bit line sense amplifier the input and output sense amplifier each consume a certain amount of power during their operation.
Also, upon writing of data, a writing driver transmits write data received from a data input buffer to a pair of input and output lines. The writing driver also consumes a certain amount of power whenever it operates.
In particular, recently, there has been an increasing demand for a semiconductor memory device having a large bandwidth, i.e., a large amount of input and output (IO) data transmitted per unit time, with the development of multimedia applications. Accordingly, semiconductor memory devices having high bandwidths of X16, X32, X64, etc. have been developed. This increase of the bandwidth increases the number of data output terminals, which consequently increases the number of input and output sense amplifiers and writing drivers. Therefore, the amount of power which is consumed by the input and output sense amplifiers and writing drivers is also increased.